


Not Playing Games, OR: "This time, it looks like an officer on patrol has been shot in the arm."

by friendlytroll



Category: Lupin III
Genre: Blood, Comfort, Gun Violence, Injury, M/M, Rivals, Unresolved Romantic Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-18
Updated: 2018-08-18
Packaged: 2019-06-29 09:23:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15726570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/friendlytroll/pseuds/friendlytroll
Summary: Lupin has a lot of dangerous enemies; Zenigata counts himself as chief among them, of course. He's used to these lowlives cropping up time and again. He didn't count on finding himself targeted to try and spur lupin into a game of chess.But he's not about to sit back and take it, either. He's going to make it clear one way or another to Zylberstein that he's nobody's pawn.Contains Zenigata catching a bullet non-graphicaly, a few mentions of blood, and needing to be patched up. Also contains Lupin having too many self sacrificing idiots in his life.





	Not Playing Games, OR: "This time, it looks like an officer on patrol has been shot in the arm."

**Author's Note:**

> Set around the events of Series 5,Episode 19: A 7.62mm Mirage.  
> Based on my own immediate conclusions that Zenigata had been injured based on 'news of a cop being shot' being the last cue we see right before Lupin willfully takes the bait... and with no apparent arguments from Jigen, either.  
> Besides, hard boiled men have to get into a little trouble sometimes.

Later, in his report it made a simple enough incident. A lucky grab at Lupin while tracking him to a new hideout, an unseen gunman, and an unlucky injury.  
There was some talk of trying to press for pinning the fire on Daisuke Jigen but the Inspector recognized that for what it was- Little more then a tissue thin excuse to justify a violent or even lethal takedown. He’d seen it before. At least this time he was alive enough to keep it from escalating. Between demonstrating the bullet casings were all wrong, Lupin had hundreds of enemies and plenty of attempts on his life, they had no leg to stand on in claiming Zenigata had been the target.  
Which for all he knew was true.  
He wasn’t lying. He was simply refusing to add irrelevant details.  
This is what Zenigata tells himself, as he lays awake in his hospital bed. It’s late. He’s never a fan of being stuck in these places- it always feels like a waste of time. He feels that way now, furiously writing in his note-pad, because since the moment he’d woken up under sterile lights he’d felt… something. Some instinct, flaring and hammering on his nerves.  
It doesn’t help that he has to hold the pad balanced in his lap, his left arm tensed and numbed at his side.

Zenigata had been, as arguably always, trailing Lupin. No matter how annoying it was to try and get to him before a heist actually started, he had a special love for knowing he might be chasing a target that didn’t know to run yet. It wasn’t a position he often got over Lupin, after all. Lupin, he grimly knew, would always be faster then him. He might always win at a dead sprint.  
He Lupin always had to stop moving eventually. Zenigata didn’t have to outrun him. He just had to be more relentless.  
That had been his approach; a steady, even walk through the crowds, his eyes fixed carefully on Lupin’s back from at minimum a half a block away at all times. Even if his pulse hammered at him to break into a dead run, he forced patience.  
His moment came when Lupin made a turn into a side street; barely more then a wide alley bordered by crumbling walls.  
He could have known something was off right then. Right when his hand had fallen on the thief, and he had seen genuine surprise.  
“GOT you, Lupin.” he growled, his hand locked tight as a vice around the thief’s upper arm. Lupins head had shot around to look up at him with the expression of genuine surprise… that melted all too fast into a scowl.  
“Pops! Geeze, don’t sneak up on me like that- do you ever take a day off?” Lupin tugs his arm, but Zenigata’s grip was worse to try and weasel out of then his handcuffs were.  
“Justice never sleeps.” he’d snarled, feeling a savage burst of glee. He’d thought then, stupidly, that Lupins behavior showed he’d finally worn him down, finally gotten him to truly take him SERIOUSLY.  
“Oh for…. damnit.” Lupin had twisted- his free hand grabbing Zenigata’s collar with a harsh yank, glaring up at him.  
“I’m not in the mood to PLAY.” Lupins hiss had hit like a blow. No playfulness. No ‘you got me’ aggravation. Nothing but flat, raw annoyance.  
He liked to think he had only blinked, genuinely hurt, for a second or two, before forcefully regaining his resolve. He knew something furious had definitely been rising to his throat, ready to let the thief know just how little he cared if his pursuit wasn’t amusing enough.  
But the glint of light in the distance was exactly where his memory became blurred. For all he knew now, all he might really have seen was some unrelated motion, or a shift of the light. For all he knew, trying to remember every detail, he had just been lucky. Whatever the reason, that had been when he’d suddenly tightened his grip on Lupin and pulled as hard as he possibly could, turning on his heel against the motion until Zenigata’s shadow had fallen over Lupin…  
And then the world turned red with pain. Later he’d find out he was lucky in one way; the bullet had missed the bones or tendons. But it hadn’t made much of a difference. The impact send him forward only stopped by… it was blurry, but something warm and solid had shoved in under him, holding him up. “Pops!”  
Lupin’s voice. That was the last clear thing.  
He had, apparently, been found propped up against the wall; if someone hadn’t made a compression bandage with ripped strips of cloth, and called emergency services, he was told, it could have been much worse. That should have burned the worst. Being saved by his sworn enemy… a long time ago he could have spend his whole recovery fuming on that alone. But If Lupin wasn’t a good man, then he was something close enough. It was nothing but natural that he would help someone he didn’t mean to get hurt.  
What burned was somehow everything around it. The lack of secondary fire. The sound of Lupin’s shout. The information only just given to him, shortly after it had been found, that this was now one of several seemingly unrelated shootings being investigated.  
He closes his notes, and forces himself to lay back. Rest long enough. Then… they could just try and stop him from leaving and see how that went. 

His arm still hurts a few days later. But his Directors over the years always inevitably tired of trying to force him to stay off the case for more then a few days. Besides, he’d argued. He was hardly doing anything strenuous. Just taking a standard statement from a local incident that could have been related to the shootings.  
What danger, he’d argued, could he have been putting himself into.  
As he got out of his car, Zenigata’s regards Mr. Zylberstein’s property with a critical eye. How many hundreds of million or billion dollar homes had he been to, over the years…? And yet he could count on one hand the times it didn’t seem like a useless monument to their wealth.  
The gates had rolled open when he arrived without needing to so much as give his name. Its hard to keep tense suspicion from welling at that… but he strides inside.  
It’s almost as he could have expected. Zylberstein was waiting for him in a room where every object probably had more insurance on it then Zenigata did on himself. Every surface was sleek as gold, rich with wine dark colors, or dull and glossy with mahogany tones. The old man sat, his own elegant arm chair, waiting for him in the light from a fire.  
“Now whatever could a fine officer of the law have to speak to me about?” Zenigata watches him smile with an offensively transparent contempt. There is no second chair in the room, despite an empty spot where one might have been expected.  
“Inspector Zenigata, ICPO. Just needed to collect a statement, sir. I understand you were found hurt.” He keeps his tone calm, though it’s still gruff at best. The details unfurl behind his eyes, at the ready.  
Found injured, and apparently fainted, in a remote area. Claimed to have simply ‘had a bit of a fall’, which had apparently satisfied his higher ups to such a great degree they had seen no reason to waste further resources looking into it. But the men they had left behind to guard the site had known better then to try and keep Zenigata out.  
The ruins damage could have been old. He supposed. But the bullet casings certainly weren’t. If someone had tried to clean up they did a shit job, leaving him with a good handful of the shells… and one, single chess pawn. Black.  
“My, my… how thorough. I’m afraid I may not have much more to say then what I told the police my story. Nothing more then a silly little game.” the old man picked up a wine glass from a table next to him, eyes fixed on Zenigata.  
“Do you enjoy games, Inspector?” he asked, swirling his glass just enough to make the light shine off of it, glossy and red.  
“I can’t say I do.” the sound is not a growl by the lightest technicality. He suspects it wouldn’t matter if it was more overt… but the anger in his chest was cold. He refuses to give a man like this the satisfaction.  
“What a pity. I find them to be the finest way to pass the time… but I should be clear, I don’t mean any silly, frivolous little things. A game is a challenge. A contest between equals.” the glass is set down again, clicking against the wood as he regards Zenigata like the man was nothing more then some… passing, vaguely unusual sight. The way one might look at a passing deer.  
“Anything less then that… really. That’s just a toy. Oh, toys can be delightfully amusing. But at the end of the day they go back in their box. And childish fun only lasts for so long before it’s time to throw a toy away.” Zylberstein seems more then happy to amuse himself with the sound of his own voice.  
“I wouldn’t know. I didn’t play around much as a child, either. I prefer my challenges in my work.” he retorts.  
“I imagine you do. I wonder if Lupin ever gets to feel the same way.”It’s nearly enough to make something in Zenigata snap, but he holds it back. He was being baited. And he’d been baited before by far, far better.  
“Somehow it’s never come up. He certainly seems to attract trouble… I see it all the time.” he slides his hands into his pockets, beginning an easy, back and forth pacing motion. There was probably a sight on him already. He doesn’t care.  
“Someone he’s robbed, or cheated, or bested… or maybe’s just heard of him. They get all worked up with some plan… it all blurs together a little over the years.” he casts a glance to the old man only for a second, expression flat.  
“They all share one thing in common… I doubt any single one of them stays on his mind for more then a week.” he snarls.  
“Ho, ho. And I suppose, Inspector… you think, if you vanished, you’d stay on his mind for longer?” Zylberstein’s voice is sardonic and terse, the sound of a petulant fool growing bored. But Zenigata’s pacing has taken him close enough. His left fists slams down on the table the old mans wine glass sat on; the wood splintering down the middle as he forces the blow through, putting the whole of his body weight behind it. The legs crack as the top splits, not so much in a clean neat break as a hole blown clean through. The wineglass goes with it, shattering on the floor at their feet. Zenigata’s eyes are almost completely flat as he stares at Zylberstein, even as he slowly lifts his arm back up, and opens his hand. Three of the bullet shells he’d painstakingly collected hit the surface of the ruined table, jingling as they bounced on the jagged, split wood.  
Blood hits the floor with them. He can feel the wet of it running down his left arm, and finds he simply doesn’t care. About that, or about the old man’s eyes on him, or the expression of twisting, cruelly amused fury.  
“The other thing these men seem to have in common… is how completely, and utterly beneath him they all are.” Zenigata says as he straightens up. Suddenly sliding in posture back to a calm, professional policeman“My apologies that I was not able to help understand your injury. But I can assure you… the ICPO will be sure to thoroughly investigate the matter.” Zenigata turns and walks away, almost expecting to hear another distant crack of thunder and red. None comes as he walks away, but as they so often do, the old man can’t seem to stand not getting the last word.  
“You’re nothing to him but a weakness, Zenigata the Seventh.”

Zenigata doesn’t look back. 

He doesn’t look at the figure waiting against a wall when he pulls back up to his current hotel, either. He’d taken the long route, but if the old man had some revenge plan it’d probably hardly matter.  
“…you wouldn’t be stepping out on me, would you Pops?” Of course.  
Zenigata pauses only then, looking down on Lupin. He’s smiling, but sometimes he could feel something like a tension behind his jokes and grins. The image of Lupin waiting for him to come back was sweet. But not enough to tune down the jangled nerves, fear, and anger of the last few days. Or maybe it was the words still ringing in his ears.  
“…I’m not in a mood to play, Lupin.” Is all he says, picking up his pace to walk inside without looking back at the mans face. He doesn’t hear footsteps, or words. He’d regret it later, for now… maybe he could just lick his wounds in peace. 

That belief lasts until when he’s sitting on the hotel bed examining how bad the damage on his arm is, when he hears a click from the definitely locked door. 

Lupins hands feel cool on his skin, steady as the thief examined his injury. Either he’d been outside longer then he assumed, or Zenigata was burning up more then he could feel. He’s propped up against the headboard, arm relinquished to Lupins grip. His injured arm is pulled out of his sleeve, half off in some stubborn… vague modesty. The thief in turn perched on the edge of the bed, legs crossed under himself.  
“God damn, Pops… you definitely bust a stitch.” he mutters, grabbing a bandage from Zenigata’s first aid kit. Which was probably more kitted out then even other cops- most didn’t carry items intended for an exorcism.  
“So I’ll go in tomorrow morning.” he grumbles, still letting his arm rest in his hands as lupin carefully wiped an alcohol soaked pad over it, making a streak of clean flesh through the blood.  
“It looks worse then it is.” he added quietly, keeping his gaze on the ceiling. The grip on his arm tightens, just slightly.  
“It looks like hell.” Lupins voice drops down into genuine tension for just a second, tossing the bloody disinfectant wipes into the trash. Gauze went down next, held in place firmly while he wraps a bandage over it- silently. It gives Zenigata too much time to think, or try not to think. For all the times he’d wished Lupin would shut up, it rarely seemed that pleasant when all the chatter and jokes dried up. Was he ever silent in a way that didn’t worry you? Did he just… have times he was companionably silent with anyone? Zenigata could place one, maybe two times. In a dark, damp, stone chamber… and in the sunset of a beach. They both felt like a long time ago.  
“Pops… don’t you think I got enough guys almost getting themselves killed over me?” the words might have been meant to come out as a joke, but as Zenigata glances over, his expression isn’t.  
“It’s a flesh wound, Lupin.” he grumbles- before a hand suddenly pushes against his chest, gripping the edge of his unbuttoned shirt. “Then what do you call walking in there! What did you have to prove, Pops? I already took HANDLED it!” Lupin demands, leaning over him on the bed- eyes forcefully staring down into his. It’s enough to make him close his eyes.  
“What do you care. Things will be back to normal… give it till Tuesday.” Zenigata grumbles, getting another firm tug on his shirt for his trouble. As if Lupin could even shift him. But the next thing he feels is unexpected. Something heavy, broad, and warm hitting his chest.  
“Of course I care.”  
He opens his eyes to find lupin just… slumped over from where he was sitting, face shoved just under Zenigata’s collar bone. It can’t be a comfortable position- his legs are still tangled underneath him.  
Slowly, his right arm settled over the thief back, his hand gently spread out just under the back of his neck. For all that Lupin seemed larger then life… he sure was pretty slight feeling, sometimes.  
“…well. You’re a good man, Lupin.” he manages, squeezing just faintly. Pretty far cry from his usual capture method.  
“I’m really not.” Lupin grumbles- finally seeming to untangle himself slightly, but staying right where he was, buried against his chest. For the first time in a while Zenigata smiles faintly, amused by how petulantly he defended his own supposed villainy.  
“Mmm.” he rumbled vaguely in response, restraining a snicker when Lupins fist weakly thumped his chest.  
“Alright, fine, you’re a bad, bad man. Better?” he asks, relaxing slightly back. His senses were dialing back in from his earlier rage… letting him focus on the chest against his, and the distinct cologne in the air.  
“Yes.” Lupin groused.  
“Is the definitely a bad villainous thief going to stay flopped on me, or…” Zenigata asks, smoothing his palm down Lupins back carefully, as if the man wasn’t practically indestructible. Maybe he wasn’t being careful for Lupins sake, he supposes.  
“Yeah cause otherwise you won’t go to the hospital in the morning.” Lupin drapes one of his arms over Zenigata, snickering just slightly as a low growl passes through the big man.  
“So put it in my file.” is the thief’s only retort.  
Zenigata is silent a moment from that, before he shakes his head, faintly.  
“Not everything needs to go in the paperwork.”


End file.
